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This article explores and characterizes the pandemic urbanism of NYC during the first year of COVID-19. It analyzes changes to the sidewalk and the urban lifestyle using a novel method of remote ethnography: the integrated use of Zoom video conferencing and GPS smartphone tracking to interview participants as they walked and filmed the city. The dataset, composed of transcripts, videos, and routes, was analyzed to reveal recurring themes and visualized through individual Scrollytelling maps combined into one Supermap. The findings are broken down into: 1) changes to the sidewalk, including fewer people, more outdoor sports activity, signs of social distancing, signs of closure, more bikes, and construction; and 2) lifestyle changes, including longings for the urban lifestyle, new-formed solidarity, a renewed appreciation for the local neighborhood, an undercurrent of “moving out” of the city or “moving up” to a better neighborhood, and a difference between Manhattan and the boroughs. 

The COVID-19 pandemic, travel restrictions, and social distancing measures have made it difficult to observe, monitor, or manage urban life. To capture the experience of being in New York City during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, we used a novel method of remote ethnography to interview people who were walking the city. We developed the Walkie-Talkie Map to collect and present these interviews, enabling website visitors to see what the subject saw as they walked the route of their choice. Visitors can interactively scroll through the interview and have access to additional visualizations and imagery that contextualize the main narrative. Visitors are thus able to vicariously experience what it was like to be in New York City at the outset of the COVID-19 epidemic. This work provides a case study on how to perform observational research when geographic and bodily distance has become the norm. We discuss the advantages and limitations of our method and conclude with its contributions to the study of cities and for others looking to conduct remote observational research in different fields of knowledge. The Walkie-Talkie maps can be found on this url: https://www.socialdistancing.tech.cornell.edu/what-is-a-walike-talkie